Loading Twitter updates Loading...
Follow me on Twitter
Main | Next day (Mar 10, 2007) »
20070309 Friday March 09, 2007

The Playoffs Begin DU Hockey A good weekend of hockey is about to begin: Pioneers Faceoff Against Wisconsin in WCHA Playoffs This Weekend. We have season tickets for tomorrow night's game, but not tonight's. Last night, I did my first search on craigslist and found a bunch - many selling for face value. One guy was giving away on-the-glass seats for free, but I missed him by a couple hours. Needless to say, I found some seats and will be attending tonight's game as well as all the other games this weekend. Go DU!

Update: While the games were good this weekend, they didn't end like I'd hoped. Oh well, better luck next year. Posted in General at Mar 09 2007, 11:28:43 AM MST

Integrating Selenium with Maven 2 I spent some time this past week integrating Selenium with Maven 2. This post is designed to show you how to do this in your Maven 2 projects.

First of all, there were two types of testing scenarios I wanted to make possible. The first was to allow HTML-based tests that web designers could create and run with Selenium IDE. As far as I know, Selenium IDE is capable of recording and exporting Java-based tests (powered by TestNG or JUnit), but I don't believe it's capable of playing them back. So for Java Developers, I wanted to allow them to write their tests in Java.

To get Maven to run HTML-based tests, the easiest way seems to be using the <selenese> Ant task. I tried Mavenium as well, but it 1) doesn't use the latest version of Selenium RC and 2) reports success when tests fail. Below is a Maven profile that I'm using in an AppFuse-based project to run HTML tests. 

<profiles>
    <profile>
        <id>integration-test</id>
        <activation>
            <property>
                <name>!maven.test.skip</name>
            </property>
        </activation>
        <build>
            <plugins>
                <plugin>
                    <groupId>org.codehaus.cargo</groupId>
                    <artifactId>cargo-maven2-plugin</artifactId>
                    <version>0.3-SNAPSHOT</version>
                    <configuration>
                        <wait>${cargo.wait}</wait>
                        <container>
                            <containerId>${cargo.container}</containerId>
                            <!--home>${cargo.container.home}</home-->
                            <zipUrlInstaller>
                                <url>${cargo.container.url}</url>
                                <installDir>${installDir}</installDir>
                            </zipUrlInstaller>
                        </container>
                        <configuration>
                            <home>${project.build.directory}/${cargo.container}/container</home>
                            <properties>
                                <cargo.hostname>${cargo.host}</cargo.hostname>
                                <cargo.servlet.port>${cargo.port}</cargo.servlet.port>
                            </properties>
                        </configuration>
                    </configuration>
                    <executions>
                        <execution>
                            <id>start-container</id>
                            <phase>pre-integration-test</phase>
                            <goals>
                                <goal>start</goal>
                            </goals>
                        </execution>
                        <execution>
                            <id>stop-container</id>
                            <phase>post-integration-test</phase>
                            <goals>
                                <goal>stop</goal>
                            </goals>
                        </execution>
                    </executions>
                </plugin>
                <plugin>
                    <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
                    <executions>
                        <execution>
                            <id>launch-selenium</id>
                            <phase>integration-test</phase>
                            <configuration>
                                <tasks>
                                    <taskdef resource="selenium-ant.properties">
                                        <classpath refid="maven.plugin.classpath"/>
                                    </taskdef>
                                    <selenese suite="src/test/resources/selenium/TestSuite.html"
                                              browser="*firefox" timeoutInSeconds="180" port="5555"
                                              results="${project.build.directory}/selenium-firefox-results.html"
                                              startURL="http://${cargo.host}:${cargo.port}/${project.build.finalName}/"/>
                                </tasks>
                            </configuration>
                            <goals>
                                <goal>run</goal>
                            </goals>
                        </execution>
                    </executions>
                    <dependencies>
                        <dependency>
                            <groupId>ant</groupId>
                            <artifactId>ant-nodeps</artifactId>
                            <version>1.6.5</version>
                        </dependency>
                        <dependency>
                            <groupId>org.openqa.selenium.server</groupId>
                            <artifactId>selenium-server</artifactId>
                            <version>0.9.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
                        </dependency>
                    </dependencies>
                </plugin>
            </plugins>
        </build>
    </profile>
    <profile>
        <id>selenium-ie</id>
        <activation>
            <os>
                <family>windows</family>
            </os>
        </activation>
        <build>
            <plugins>
                <plugin>
                    <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
                    <executions>
                        <execution>
                            <id>launch-selenium</id>
                            <phase>integration-test</phase>
                            <configuration>
                                <tasks>
                                    <taskdef resource="selenium-ant.properties">
                                        <classpath refid="maven.plugin.classpath"/>
                                    </taskdef>
                                    <selenese suite="src/test/resources/selenium/TestSuite.html"
                                              browser="*firefox" timeoutInSeconds="180" port="5555"
                                              results="${project.build.directory}/selenium-firefox-results.html"
                                              startURL="http://${cargo.host}:${cargo.port}/${project.build.finalName}/"/>
                                    <selenese suite="src/test/resources/selenium/TestSuite.html"
                                              browser="*iexplore" timeoutInSeconds="180" port="5555"
                                              results="${project.build.directory}/selenium-ie-results.html"
                                              startURL="http://${cargo.host}:${cargo.port}/${project.build.finalName}/"/>
                                </tasks>
                            </configuration>
                            <goals>
                                <goal>run</goal>
                            </goals>
                        </execution>
                    </executions>
                </plugin>
            </plugins>
        </build>
    </profile>
</profiles>

The above setup will allow you to run Selenium tests in Firefox, and in IE as well when you're on Windows. I tried to get Safari to work on the Mac, but it just opens Safari and hangs.

HTML tests are great for non-programmers, but what about developers that prefer Java and want test reports to be included in the surefire-plugin's reports? That's easy enough. First of all, put your tests in a particular package so they can be excluded from the normal testing cycle. I used a webapp.selenium package. I configured the surefire-plugin to exclude these tests: 

<plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    <configuration>
        <excludes>
            <exclude>**/selenium/*Test.java</exclude>
        </excludes>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

Then I added the newly released selenium-maven-plugin to my "integration-test" profile and configured surefire to run the Selenium Java tests. 

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
    <artifactId>selenium-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-beta-1</version>  
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>start-selenium</id>
            <phase>pre-integration-test</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>start-server</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
                <background>true</background>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>
<plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>surefire-it</id>
            <phase>integration-test</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>test</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
                <excludes>
                    <exclude>none</exclude>
                </excludes>
                <includes>
                    <include>**/selenium/*Test.java</include>
                </includes>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

Yeah, Maven can be quite verbose when configuring profiles. I contacted the Maven list to see if it's possible to simplify all this XML, but so far haven't found a solution.

If you'd like to see a pom.xml with the Selenium bits and a profile that runs both HTML and Java-based tests, click here (JavaScript needs to be enabled for this to work).

NOTE: I used 0.9.1-SNAPSHOT of Selenium Server because it solves issues with the latest version of Firefox.

This brings up a related question I asked on the AppFuse mailing list a couple of days ago:

Do you use the Canoo WebTests? If not, how do you do UI testing? If so, would you prefer Selenium?

If you've tried AppFuse 2.x and have an opinion, please add a comment. Personally, I like Selenium, but I like how Canoo WebTest can be somewhat friendly to designers and allow i18n testing with Ant's property file support. With Selenium, you have to use parse/replace or Java tests to do i18n testing. Then again, if you need to test a lot of Ajax functionality, it's likely that Selenium will work much better for you. Posted in Java at Mar 09 2007, 10:35:04 AM MST 17 Comments